Well, not to stray into a discussion about that but Japan does also appear to have serious issues with sexual harassment and similar behavior, although I guess the cause and effect of that and certain kinds of Hentai can't really be determined.
Anyway, having lived in both Europe and the USA I definitely felt like there was a lot less social cohesion in the latter. It's kind of hard to put my finger on what it was exactly, but the general atmosphere certainly felt a lot less trusting and more individualistic... it is kind of hard to explain the difference unless you have experienced it yourself, I think.
Admittedly this was in the South, so other parts of America may be well be different.

Yeah, I agree with all of that that.
If Cuba does indeed decide to follow through with opening up their economy, they should do so gradually and partially, like China and Vietnam, instead of the absolutely disastrous "shock therapy" ideas that American economists managed to convince the former USSR to attempt.

Yeah, and the amount and quality of healthcare, education and housing you can provide for your citizens is of course intimately tied to how productive the overall economy is.
Also, if only those basic needs matter then I don't see what your problem with capitalist countries is. The amount of people that can't meet those needs is pretty small, and most have enough for way more than that.

GDP per capita means the amount of income that is produced per person in the country. A pretty important metric if you consider money to have a noteworthy effect on peoples' lives.
Of course it shouldn't be the only standard by which to evaluate a society, don't get me wrong, but Cuba is at any rate a pretty damn poor country nowadays, which is worth taking into consideration amidst all the discussions about how well the Castros have run things.

Khaleesi did nothing wrong replied to Pony Empress Jace's topic in General Chatter

Barbed wire and machine guns weren't in use yet, and those were the main reasons for why WW1 turned out the way it did.
In the American civil war case it probably had more to do with general lack of training and experience. If you look at European wars that took place around the same time, like the Franco-Prussian or Austro-Prussian war, they didn't play out like this at all. European warfare focused on decisive battlefield maneuvers such as encircling actions and bayonet charges, and losing army of a battle often got pursued until it dissolved or had to surrender.
American forces on the other hand lacked the training and organization to do this (as well as the cavalry), so instead a typical battle was basically the two sides lining up and blasting the hell out of each other for a number of hours, followed by the losing side limping away and being able to regroup. Rinse and repeat for four years until the South ran out of men.

Hehe, we should get Dennis Rodman into this thread too.
As for how well run Cuba is, their GDP per capita is half of Romania's. Not that impressive for a country that used to be relatively developed during the earlier half of the 20th century. They did better than many other communist regimes though, you have to give them that.

Khaleesi did nothing wrong replied to The Number 10's topic in Entertainment

In theory maybe, not in practice. The reason for why Netflix even produces this show is to get lots of viewers and lots of money, not to do as faithful an adaption of the source material as possible.
Given that the games were enormous successes and are where almost all the fans of the franchise from outside Eastern Europe come from, you can count on them having a big impact on how the show ends up looking.
As for the books I've only read the first one, but I thought it was pretty mediocre to be honest. I hope they get better as the series goes on, because the writing in that one hardly measured up to the games. At least not the third one.

I know a couple of Han Chinese people from that province in China actually. They see themselves as colonizers and are completely open about the reason for why the Chinese government encouraged them to migrate there being to turn the native Uyghurs into a minority, and thus cement Han control over the region.
Their views on Muslims in general are not that positive either, unsurprisingly.

Khaleesi did nothing wrong replied to Ser Scot A Ellison's topic in General Chatter

Even so states only arose in very small portions of the total agriculture-practicing world. Around a few of the big rivers in the most arable regions of the world basically, and that was it. The Mediterranean region at large took several millennia longer to get going for example, even though they too were farming at the time, and it was like 5000 years from the introduction of agriculture in Northern Europe to when you can talk about real states forming there.
State creation probably had more to do with population densities than with agriculture per say. Once you hit a certain population treshold you can start forming cities, create specialized economic classes, and produce surpluses to pay for government bureaucracies, large monuments, standing armies, and so on. Hence why civilizations first arose in the most easily farmed areas of the world and then gradually spread to more and more regions as new agricultural methods were developed that allowed more effective production (and hence population increases) in less hospitable areas as well. The introduction of the iron plow at the beginning of the Middle Ages was one such invention that revolutionized agriculture in Northern Europe, for example, due to the kind of heavy soils we have there compared to the Mediterranean region.

Khaleesi did nothing wrong replied to Ser Scot A Ellison's topic in General Chatter

Also, the transition from bands of hunter-gatherers to actual states was very long. Like, thousands of years long. The people involved would not have noticed it.
Even the shift from hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers seems to have been very slow, driven by gradual population increases and advances in agricultural technology.

Khaleesi did nothing wrong replied to GAROVORKIN's topic in General Chatter

I don't think you can sustain a libertarian system in a modern democracy. Eventually it would become apparent to the large majority of the population that they are getting seriously screwed over by the economic policies, and they'd start voting in representatives from other ideologies instead. This is arguably what is starting to happen in the USA right now, what with Trump and Bernie and everything, and that country is still quite far from being really libertarian.
If you look back at the 19th century, when many Western countries were governed fairly closely to these ideas*, only the wealthy had full voting rights.
*Well, when it came to economic policy at least.

That would be good for laying the hammer down on the finance industry, and remake it into the relatively slow and boring sector that it was until the eighties.
It has probably not been that good for either the economy or most normal workers that so much power has been shifted from the corporate executives to the institutional shareholders that own the companies since then, given that the former have little real attachment to the companies they invest in, and also often only do so for relatively brief periods. Meaning that they are mainly interested in short term, quarterly profits and don't really give a shit about what happens to either the companies or their employees afterwards.
A CEO of a publicly noted corporation that cares too much about his employees' wellbeing or the long term success of the company runs a high risk of being booted out nowadays, and that is pretty sad.